Sea holly, budded on the 12th (framed between two bean poles, thick ones to support rampant grower Scarlet Runner Bean). Fava/broad bean plants and irises (bearded & Siberian) behind it. Sea holly flowers are a favorite of bees.
The belle of the ball, Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum): This is the plant that's gotten the most attention so far this year, even though it's not even budded yet! It's so incredibly massive and distinctive a plant that it quite literally turns heads.
One of my favorite things about Cup Plant is how its unfolding leaf pairs look. Here is a closeup showing what I mean. You can also better see how distinctive its unfurled leaves are, kind of like an echinacea overdosed on steroids. I've written here before about how Cup Plant provides a water source for tiny creatures after rains, as its leaf pairs really do cup, creating puddles by the stems, and about how the flowers are a good nectar source and birds like the seeds. I've also more recently discovered that some organic farmers grow Cup Plant as a nutritious fodder; Turtle Tree sells it in its section on cover crops and other beneficial seeds.
Today is just beautiful, the kind of perfect late spring or early summer day that has been so rare here this year: mid-70s F under a mostly sunny sky with a pleasantly refreshing breeze. I worked on the back garden today, something I’d been neglecting, as I so often do. I put in the three new alpine strawberries (to add to the 3 already there), three wild strawberries (I have a fourth one, but haven’t decided whether to put it in front or back), red-veined sorrel, salad burnet, garden cress, a native penstemon that actually overwintered in a little pot and is blooming now, native Silene virginica (ditto on both counts), the rest of the hardy cultivated violets (I’ve still got some wild violets to plant – though the wild strawberries [from Toadshade] came with wild violet seedlings in their pots, so I also planted some wild violets today!), some bellflowers, leaf celery that I got at today’s farmers’ market, Rudbeckia triloba ‘Prairie Glow’ (which is a biennial; I grew it two summers ago and it bloomed fabulously for two months or more, but didn’t self-seed; I noted today that having added the compost mulch layer to the back garden beds seems to be increasing self-seeding, like for example I noted columbine seedlings for the first time in this garden today, so hopefully this time it will in fact self-seed), two foxglove ‘Spanish Peaks’ (a supposedly perennial kind), one of the several waiting flowering tobaccos (Nicotiana x alata ‘Mutabilis’), and most of the sad little plants from that package – 4 Solomon’s seal, 7 sessile-leafed bellwort, 7 cucumber-root, and 7 starflower.
The last ones went into a bed I hadn’t done a lick of work on since two summers ago, except for trying to pull out the grass every so often (as the grass is always creeping into my back beds) and putting down compost every so often, as well as watering during heat waves or droughts. It’s got the stuff that has survived for the past two years – three epimediums, heart-leafed Alexander (which looks unhappy this year, but is still there), wild native ginger, sweet woodruff, and Allegheny pachysandra, as well as some large patches of lush moss which I have encouraged (I’ve even taken moss from other parts of the garden and planted them there). I originally also planted two more natives, bugbane and Iris cristata, which both did well for me in my old moist-to-wet shade garden but they disliked it and both didn’t return last spring, which wasn’t overly surprising because they had looked increasingly weak the previous year. In my experience, Solomon’s seal can survive just about everything – it seeded into a bramble of raspberries (!!!) in my old garden (I’ve always figured the birds, who loved to sit in the bramble, did the seeding), and i’ve seen it from full shade to nearly full sun in just about every possible location – so I’m not overly worried about that one, but I’m not sure about the others. According to my favorite native shade plant book, the out-of-print Growing Woodland Plants, they already tend to resent transplanting, and these are small and their roots were all tangled together. Well, we’ll see. Hopefully at least some of them will make it. I made sure to water them as soon as I finished working in the garden. After kneeling for so long, I needed to do something involving standing, so since today is a ‘leaf day,’ I seeded some leafy herbs into the sunniest of the three beds in back.
I meant to plant the bunching onions and the sad little cilantro ‘Santo’ that is budding already because a slug ate all its leaves, but I forgot to bring them with me to the beds and didn’t remember them until I was already feeling too tired to do more planting. I had been meaning to plant the rose as well, but it’s so small I’ve thought better of it and am going to see how potting it up till it sizes up a bit more goes.
The Robins have grown so attached to the bird bath that they twice used it a little while I was working on the shade bed of mostly natives about two meters away (the first time I’ve ever seen a bird use it while I was so closeby), though both times they abruptly decided not to after all and flew away partway through. I cleaned it and refilled it after I finished in the garden, so I hope they were happy once I came inside.
Today was farmers’ market day. I got:
- The aforementioned leaf celery
- Two rudbeckias – one is labelled ‘Indian Summer’ (the cultivar I grew last summer), the other is unlabelled
- A six-pack of salvia ‘Marble Arch,’ already blooming in a mix of white, pink, and purple flowers
- Three more seed sunflowers (sort of four, as there’s also a young sunflower seedling in one of the three pots)
There aren’t as many flower plants at the market this year, which I’ve been finding a bit disappointing. I guess the farmers are using the surge in interest in vegetable gardening here in the US to their advantage, which is of course good for them and for those who want the plants, but for people like me who start most of our vegetables from seeds (be it indoors or out) and rely more on plants for flowers, it’s not as exciting a development.
The trellis netting over the mesclun pots has slowed but not completely stopped the squirrels. There was some new damage today, though it was hard to judge how much. They also did a lot more damage to the biggest pots – they wiped out about 25% of the remaining radish seedlings as well as some other root crop seedlings in the root crop pot, and they wiped out another 25% of the “miscellaneous greens” pot’s seedlings, meaning they’ve now killed about half the seedlings in each of those two pots (though at least the radishes have germinated too thickly and I can move some of the seedlings to new spots, assuming they survive the transplant since root vegetables generally hate transplanting). They have barely touched the lettuce pot since their initial damage, and I can’t figure out why it’s less enchanting, as it’s right next to the other two pots. Regardless, I really, really hope the bird netting comes soon!
I mailed my autumn seed order in to Turtle Tree today. I got cabbage (European and Chinese), a couple autumn carrots, an autumn turnip, a leek that’s supposed to be hardy outdoors with a little protection and another that’s traditionally heeled in over the winter, more cover crops, a couple books. My Kitazawa Seed Co. order came today, and I just ordered from them over the weekend! Their service was just as fast as last time.
They’re now forecasting a humidity-laden heat wave to start in about 10 days. I wonder if (assuming it comes) it will kill all these cool-weather things that have been flourishing. Just today I finally found a forming fava/broad bean pod. The favas have been blooming for at least two weeks, but pod formation in favas is such a sensitive thing – the wrong conditions, and the flowers just drop off. (However, the baby pods are hard to spot, so it’s possible there were small ones already growing on the favas farther from the edge of the garden bed and I just haven’t noticed them.)
Rereading The Holistic Garden (at 59 hand-typed large-font pages, more a bookette than a book) and Edaphos: Dynamics of a Natural Soil System. They are both interesting books (as may be obvious from the fact that I am rereading them!) that I would recommend to other serious gardeners. I think Edaphos would be interesting to any type of gardener (especially those who use organic practices or are considering/trying to switch to them); despite its ambiguous title, The Holistic Garden is a book(ette) focused on crop gardening.
